Being that it’s at once an embarrassing failure and an unignorable success, it’s a bit of a shock that Sam Mendes’ Revolutionary Road has thus far been received with fewer vitriolic open letters and impassioned defenses than shrugs of measured praise. Certainly the best work Mendes has ever produced for the screen, Revolutionary Road works (on the level that it does work) as a showcase for performances: big stars Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet are probably at the top of their game, a star-making performance is registered in less than a handful of scenes from Michael Shannon, and, in the ultimate nagging old lady role, Kathy Bates reminds us why she is the greatest living nagging old lady in all of cinema. That all of this talent is put to the service of an adaptation which fundamentally bastardizes the main project of Richard Yates’ novel and neuters its cruel vision of the inability of the individual to grapple with his/her own soul sickness without projecting toxicity outward, doesn’t diminish the actors’ achievements, but it does force us to question whether masterworks of the literary form should be adapted into prospective Oscar cash-ins to begin with, if it means necessarily stripping said masterworks of the daring that makes them masterful.
DiCaprio and Winslet play Frank and April Wheeler, beautiful, unique young snowflakes with the world at their feet, who wake up one day to find themselves less young, slightly less beautiful and not at all unique. Unhappily married and bitterly ensconced in suburbia with two unwanted kids, it’s clearly been some time since April and Frank could unite in hope for the future. After a spectacular knock-down marital spat –– which so organically bubbles up across a chain of miscommunications that we’re made to understand that its occurrence is not at all unusual –– April tries to save the marriage by salvaging a long-discarded fantasy of moving the family to Paris. The promise of an imminent escape from stultifying suburbia — and their shared joy in smugly bragging about said escape to the neighbors and co-workers whose ordinariness they despise — briefly invigorates the Wheelers’ marriage, as both husband and wife submerge their everyday drudgery in fantasies of a new life.
The dolts and bores the Wheelers plan to leave behind all question the practicality of the gambit, with the exception of John Givings (Shannon), the mentally imbalanced adult son of the couple’s invasive realtor (Bates). John initially commends Frank and April for being able to spot the “hopeless emptiness” at the center of their lives and daring to do something about it, but when life happens and the Wheelers are forced to choose between hiding under the covers of their solipsistic dream world or being grown ups and dealing with it, the institutionalized man child gives them the dressing down that they deserve. Though carried from book to screen almost to the letter, this subplot is one of many areas where Mendes grafts damaging tonal revisions on to the material. In the novel, when April and Frank agree that it feels good to be complimented by a lunatic, Yates is laughing at their compulsion to recast a red flag as a green light, at their determination to protect every self-delusion rather than risk self-examination. Mendes, on the other hand, as if feeling insecure about his undeserved Oscar and afraid that I’ll be take away, lunges for the Hollywood cliche: he makes the crazy guy the smartest guy in the room, the shining example of the punishment in store for anyone who dares to lash out against the constraints of a domesticated life. This fits with the odd feminist subtext which Mendes and Winslet have, through the course of promoting the film, repeatedly insisted is in the material; for this husband and wife creative team, April’s final, devastating act of violence against the marriage and herself, is heroic. To everyone else, it’s tragic, but also irredeemably crazy.
Mendes’ Revolutionary Road is thus the prime specimen of the adaptation that’s simultaneously “faithful” to the source, and totally contrary to its spirit. The brutal magic of Yates’ Revolutionary Road lies not in the things April and Frank say to each other, but in the bleak knowledge, which they keep completely inside of themselves, that they’re incapable of translating what they really think and feel, of who they sense they are and of what that means in opposition to the larger world, into any sort of honest language at all. Although his book is rarely what they call “funny haha,” Yates essentially plays this internal/external dichotomy towards turning his characters into punchlines; the author so convinces that his subjects are fools that if we feel sympathy for them at all, it’s not because we can sense that they’re really good people who don’t deserve their sad lot, but because it’s possible that nobody deserves to held under such unrelentingly vicious scrutiny. The film seems barely interested in this necessarily self-hatred-inducing split; when given expression at all, it’s through DiCaprio, who has some devastating moments-in-between moments, when Mendes allows us to glimpse Frank Wheeler silent and alone. In general, the most incisive and precise bits of Revolutionary Road occur when Frank and April stop talking and we’re allowed to simply watch them behaving withing the mise en scene (which is as strenuously designed for drabness as Mad Man is designed for sexiness). The last twenty minutes of the film, carried by Winslet in a performance so enigmatic as to be unnerving, are truly devastating.
But mostly Mendes dispenses with Yates withering gaze. A number of crucial excisions from the novel serve to humanize Frank while enhancing the notion that suburbia itself, and not her decidedly unconventional childhood, are responsible for April’s cruelty and hysteria. Particularly frustrating is the truncating of Frank’s affair with a wide-eyed secretary (Zoe Kazan), which Yates uses to confirm our suspicions that Frank would be calculatingly, destructively self-obsessed whether trapped with an emasculating wife/life or not. Mendes and screenwriter Justin Haythe begin this subplot spectacularly (DiCaprio is scarily spot-on as the cad engineering the seduction of an unsuspecting innocent), and then essentially let it hang in the wind. But more troubling than the direct changes and omissions from the source, is the pervasive sense in the material that has been directly, almost word-for-word adapted that Mendes and company either misread Yates’ critique, or willfully castrated. In the mid-section of the film, when the screen version of The Wheelers are in deep in their fantasy of entitlement, Mendes offers us countless scenes of the couple sitting around in a halcyonic whiskey daze, talking about how they’re talking about “real feelings” and how pretty soon their lives will be full of “living life like it matters,” all put together as if we’re supposed to be rooting for these crazy kids to take the next step, instead of with each passing moment understanding that their dreams are pathetic and childish, and that moving to Paris won’t do a bit to solve the deep rot within themselves.
I could go on, citing areas where Mendes chose to excavate the brutal truth from his source in order to recast what was a story about the blackest rot of human nature into a story of doomed love. But of what use is that to anyone who hasn’t read the book, who will walk into Revolutionary Road and walk out, I think, largely satisfied with a period soap opera containing performances of nuance and range and presented with a patience rarely seen on the mega-budget screen? In holding on to the things we love in the face of adaptation, at what point do we become bitter fanboys, griping over discrepancies, livid over subtleties that maybe couldn’t have survived a cross-media translation even if the director had taken more care to protect them? At which point can or should we allow ourselves to give up our personal visions of what an adaptation should look like, the images that played in our own heads during our first encounter with the source, and accept that a Hollywood adaptation reuniting the stars of the highest grossing film of all time would naturally have a different agenda than a novel written by an alcoholic shut-in who never intended to speak to (and certainly was not received by) a mass audience? If we wanted a film that would somehow confirm Yates’ misanthropy, Sam Mendes and his wife and his wife’s teenage playmate were never going to give it to us.
I take comfort that it’s not as bad as it could have been. When divorced from its source, Revolutionary Road is a pefectly servicable film. Mendes may dispose of much of the meat of Yates, but he hasn’t made a film without something to say. Road’s thesis is that the present is only tolerable when our minds are on the future, that self-hatred can only be ameliorated temporarily via fantasies about becoming someone else, and that withdrawl is preferable to either rebellion or acquiescence. This is not not worth saying, and, in its final shots in particular, this film says it rather beautifully. Maybe that’s enough.
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